Someone Who Loves the Process

I’m the kind of person who likes writing. Well, I used to be.

Like pretty much everyone, I went through a dark stretch at some point. I used to be someone who passed out the second my head hit the pillow, someone who didn’t even know what insomnia was. Suddenly I couldn’t sleep deeply anymore, and I’d wake up at dawn with this anxious feeling.

What got me through back then was writing.

The me from yesterday, so sure I’d found the answer, would be nowhere to be found, and the anxiety would come wrapping around me like crazy all over again. So I’d sit down calmly in front of my laptop and keep asking myself where this anxiety was coming from, answering, asking again, following the thread deeper and deeper. Somewhere along the way, a corner of my heart would weirdly loosen up, and for some strange reason I’d feel safe.

That was probably around the time I wrote my own little autobiography to welcome turning thirty. It definitely wasn’t the cool thirty I’d imagined. But going back through the big moments of my life one by one, starting from age one (or whatever I could remember of it), I felt this odd sense of relief. Kind of like a pile of books scattered all over the floor finally finding their own spots on the shelf.

When I worked as a product manager at a tech company, my favorite part of the job was writing PRDs. I loved watching all the floating stuff, the things I’d noticed, the results of observations, the scraps of thoughts, stack up neatly in one document and turn into a single action my squad could actually go do. And convincing other people with that document gave me a huge sense of achievement too.

Then, starting in the first half of this year, AI began improving like crazy and changing a lot of things.

PRDs that used to take me a whole day of thinking now get knocked out in an hour, just by chatting with AI.

I used to do my weekly reviews neatly, week after week, but instead of writing them on my blog, I started by talking to Claude.

At some point I started noticing a lot of posts that made me go, “Yep, AI wrote this.”

And now we live in a world where AI even writes your Instagram and Threads comments for you.

Writing stopped being fun.

So I sat down in front of my laptop to write less and less.

And the less I wrote, the harder it felt to even start.

I spent a few months like that, and only recently got around to making this blog.

There are a bunch of reasons behind it, but the biggest one is that I want to become “someone who loves the process.”

I was born and raised in Korea, and I’ve lived a pretty results-driven, performance-driven life.

Whether I kept my routines or not, whether I put in the effort or not, I figured it didn’t matter as long as the results were fine.

But thinking that way caused problems when the results didn’t show up.

I definitely felt and learned a lot while trying things and failing at them, but all of that just turned into nothing.

So I decided to shift my perspective a bit.

I used to think I had to frame everything around the win, like “I pulled off X. Here’s how I did it.”

Now I feel like it’s way healthier to share the process, like “I’m working on X. Oh, and today this little thing happened,” and share the tiny results that pop up along the way.

Oh, and of course, working seven days a week with nobody but AI, part of me also just wanted to talk to actual people :)